A couple comments about pminus1 in general

[dudlio]

>First, let me say, the "bosses"(What else could I call you?) are doing a bangup job of running the project.

They're really not. They haven't found a prime in over a year and they've never allocated more than 20 users to sieving. User participation has been stagnant @ 1000 users for several years and forum participation has dropped to almost zero.

Don't get me wrong, SoB is a great project. But I think you'll find that the "bosses" gave up on the project a long time ago. It's been a user-run project ever since sieving was invented 2-3 years ago.

[hhh]

They're really not. They haven't found a prime in over a year and they've never allocated more than 20 users to sieving. User participation has been stagnant @ 1000 users for several years and forum participation has dropped to almost zero.

Don't get me wrong, SoB is a great project. But I think you'll find that the "bosses" gave up on the project a long time ago. It's been a user-run project ever since sieving was invented 2-3 years ago.

This had to be done.

It's not like the admins choose when to find a prime. It's not like they allocate people to do whatsoever. And sieving hasn't been invented 3 years ago. The project has started in March 2002, and sieving has been done since the very beginning, if I'm not mistaken.

As for the workload.
Some people might know it, I chose to help SoB's little sister project PSP by cleaning up the forum, and stuff. Sieving isn't automated there, it's more manual, etc. I can do this little part only because I'm student and don't have children.
And don't believe that because it's automated here, there isn' any work anymore, and party all the time. The factor submission have to be put into the database and gapchecked. The work has to be backupped. Imagine the server goes donw for whatever reason and has to be set up again. How much work? Count some hours, or a day. And you can't choose when to do this work, because there are 1000 people waiting. Even if you have this only twice a year, you'll be not amused.
And they have full time jobs.

Well, I'll stop here.

dudlio, you said in another thread that you would be interested perhaps in writing a sieve wrapper. Many people would be happy to have one. It hasn't been written up to now because it's plenty of work. Somebody who should know it estimated one man-month of work.
If you want to do it, you can PM me what you have done, what you think has to be done, and we can make a plan together, four eyes see more than two. If you decide not to do so, nobody will blame you.

I agree that there are many flaws in this project, but there are reasons for this, and one cannot summarize the situation by saying "They are all morons".
They are humans, and the project is running, which is worth a lot.

[dudlio]

Thanks for the encouragement, hhh. On Wednesday I sent you a spec for a sieve wrapper program. As of now I've written about 500 lines of code. Most of the major components of the sieve wrapper are finished and seem to be working.

With the components working, I am testing the main program body, to see if it loops properly (detects done ranges, uploads factors, and starts a new range).

After that, there's some cleanup work, and the program will be available for review.

Cheers